Abstract

The nervous system operates with impulses and transmissions that have time scales in the millisecond range, and yet is called upon to store information for periods of years. Evidently, the patterns of electrical activity that speed through brain circuitries, on some occasions, must modify the properties of the elements that transmit them. Understanding the nature of these modifications, the physiological forms they take, and the cellular chemistries that bring them into existence constitutes one of the major problems of neurobiology. Studies of the relatively simple nervous systems of invertebrates by Kandel and others have located synapses that are modified by experience (see Kandel, 1981, for a review). Comparable efforts on mammalian central nervous system (CNS), hampered as they are by the extraordinary complexity of the brain, are still at the stage of conclusively pinning down sites that show lasting traces of experience.

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